Write Everything Down (and not in your notes app)

I switched to handwriting everything in notebooks instead of using my phone

I’m sure that I’m not the only person who has used the notes app for literally everything—poetry lines at midnight, grocery list items, project ideas. Sometimes I’d see a word I wanted to use in a poem or as a title for a piece and I’d type it out in the app too. But I was scrolling through some of my notes the other day and found that I didn’t really remember writing any of them. I knew that I did, of course, but I didn’t have the memory of doing so. It was strange. I scrolled a bit further and found some beautiful lines and concepts that shocked me; how could I have not written about these things or used these beautiful lines in what I’ve been working on? Because I didn’t remember they were there. And maybe this is just a me thing, but I have this lingering suspicion that other people understand this weird phenomenon.

As a writer, it was kind of terrifying to see how much of what I’ve written down I’ve already forgotten about. For context, there are thousands of words worth of independent poetry lines and story concepts in my notes app. What if all the devices I own suddenly stopped working and everything in my cloud was lost? Maybe then I’d feel the grief of it. But why not now? I can’t remember the last time I was scrolling in my notes app to find a specific thing I remembered writing there. I always seem to use it as a written out pinterest board instead. So I did what any other burnt out, unmotivated university student would do: buy a pretty notebook.

What was strange about this whole experience was that I already had multiple notebooks that I was using—a journal for personal things, and art journal for scrapbooking and illustrating my thoughts, and a commonplace book that I use for mostly lists, song lyrics, and quotations from various media forms—but no notebook for creative writing.

Journaling by hand I’ve found to be really nice—to put my thoughts somewhere physical instead of in my phone. I’m on my phone a lot, so ranting in the notes app never truly feels like a release because it’s all still in my hands when I close the app to open another. But I can put an actual journal away on a shelf, in a box; I can flip through it when I’m bored—I’ve never done this with my notes app journal entries/rants. Sometimes I’ll be watching a show or listening to a song and have a lyric or quotation hit me so deeply that I need to put it somewhere; initially, I’d take a picture/screenshot, but these things get lost in my phone and I forget about them. But writing them out in a notebook was so refreshing. Now all these things I wanted to always have were somewhere I could flip through (I don’t usually scroll through the photos on my phone, but I love flipping through books).

My conclusion: if I don’t write something down physically, it won’t exist to me within a day or so.

So I bought a pretty notebook. I slapped a pretty sticker on it and decided to use it for creative writing only. As I wrote down ideas and pieces by hand, I started to notice small areas of growth and change in my style and process, especially because I was now constantly flipping back through these pages whenever I was bored. Then, I started to write out what I was noticing and things I could do to improve in certain areas, all in this one notebook. It wasn’t clean and polished like the notes app; this notebook was messy and alive, more alive than any of my notes app additions, because I was more at risk of losing/misplacing it than the cloud in my phone.

Pages from my creative-writing-only notebook

Using this notebook specifically has helped me remember more, notice my improvements, take notes of advice, and so much more. It’s slowed down my writing and has made me more thoughtful in my choices. I made an index so I could find things easily; I tab pages of importance and scratch out things when I’m stuck or frustrated. I’d recommend this to any writer or to anyone involved in any kind of creative process(es).

The act of writing things out is so much more than I thought it was. And my realization of this kind of happened right before something I’ve noticed on social media: the growing appreciation and importance of physical media (which I won’t get into because there’s a lot to say).

Write ideas by hand—notes, concepts, processes, etc. It’s become so rewarding to physically flip through my life instead of scrolling mindlessly through forgotten notes app folders. There’s more I could say on this, but I’ll leave it here for now.